Goulash, tacos, pizza

Well, it's been a few weeks since my last post! When I started up this blog, I intended to post once every couple of days, but life is just so BUSY!

Of course, for us life can be a little extra hectic since we have two children, both of whom are young and need a lot of attention, but I think it is important to point out that adopting a whole foods (vegan or otherwise) lifestyle can be time-consuming. We spend a lot of time planning our meals, which I think is really important in so many ways for families. It helps us stick to a budget, but it also really helps us keep from turning to convenience foods or eating out during the week. It's worth the time we spend, but there is no denying that it can feel like a lot of work sometimes. SO.... between kids and food shopping and cooking and dishes and cleaning up the kitchen, I don't have a lot of extra time to blog.

That being said, we've tried some pretty awesome recipes since my last post, so I wanted to share a couple of those. My absolute favorite is called Two-Bean Zucchini Goulash, it's definitely in my top 5 recipes of all time. I got this from the book Supermarket Vegan. It was super easy (one skillet, plus whatever you make to put it on like rice or cous cous) and sooo delicious. Here's a pic and recipe:

2 T olive oil
2 zucchini
1 onion, chopped
2 T tomato paste
2 T paprika
2 cloves garlic
1 can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 can cannellini or other white beans, rinsed and drained
3/4 lb plum tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1/4 c water
3/4 t salt
fresh black pepper

In a large skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add zucchini and onion and cook, stirring until softened for 5 mins. Add tomato paste, paprika, and garlic, cook stirring constantly for 2 minutes. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a brisk simmer of medium-high heat stirring occasionally. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, until desired amount of liquid has been absorbed.

We served this over whole wheat cous cous (Trader Joe's has a decent sized box for like $2) and it was seriously delicious. Even if you're a family who doesn't care to do a meatless diet, this dish is worth trying. So good and super healthy.

Another one we really liked was Ancho Lentil Tacos from the website Post Punk Vegan (lentil tacos).
The link will take you directly to the recipe if you'd like to try it yourself! Even Emory ate this one, which has been the exception rather than the rule lately with our vegan dinners (he's been eating lots of sun butter sandwiches lately). Kevin was especially fond of these, and the best part is they are super easy to customize to your particular taste. Here's a pic:

 Finally, the last of my recent favorites was a total surprise to me. It was a white asparagus spinach pizza, which didn't really sound appealing to me but wound up being really good. It was a very simple recipe, though I think Kevin changed it up a bit. Here's the recipe:

12 asparagus spears
4-5 oz baby spinach
12.3 oz firm silken tofu
1 t salt
pizza crust
1/3 c sun-dried tomatoes cut into strips

Trim asparagus, cut into 1-in pieces, steam until barely tender, about 3 mins. Add spinach, steam until wilted. Drain well. Puree tofu with salt in food processor. (Kevin pureed the sun-dried tomatoes with the tofu because they were really sticky and hard to work with.) Spread tofu over pizza crust, add asparagus, spinach, and tomatoes (unless you to what we did) and bake at 400 degrees for 12-15 mins. Here's the pic:

I would really encourage anyone reading this to try one of these recipes! Over 3 weeks of cooking these are by far the best of the bunch. The kid-friendly level just depends on what your kid has been exposed to so far - but I'd say these are pretty good for the little ones. Emory ate and liked the two of these three that he was willing to actually try!

Curry and Compost

Tonight we made a recipe out of a book I checked out from the library, Supermarket Vegan, called Curried Cauliflower and Potatoes with Black-Eyed Peas. I recently started checking cookbooks out of the library instead of buying them and I don't know why I didn't do it a long time ago. It's so much better! It's hard to tell if a cookbook is going to be a good match just based on flipping through it, and this way I can try as many different ones as I want. An online catalog search of the Omaha Public Library turned up over 80 titles with "vegan" in them (not all cookbooks, but most) so I'm sure I'll be finding a lot more to try. Supermarket Vegan is great so far, the recipes are very accessible and don't use anything that can't be found in the regular grocery store (hence the name).

Anyway, the curried cauliflower was so good! Kevin made it, so I can't say firsthand how easy it was to cook, but he didn't have any complaints, and it didn't take too long. We served it over whole wheat cous cous.

Here's the recipe:

2 T canola oil
1 small red onion, cut into 1/2 in pieces
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 T milk curry poweder
2 C low-sodium veg broth or water
1 head cauliflower, cut into florets
3/4 lb red potatoes, cubed
1/2 t salt or to taste
black pepper to taste
1 can black-eyed peas, rinsed and drained (a note in the recipe mentions chickpeas would also work)
2-3 T fresh lemon juice

Head the oil in a deep-sided skillet, add onion and cook for 4 mins. Add garlic and curry and cook another minute, stirring constantly. Add broth, cauliflower, potatoes, salt, pepper; bring to brisk simmer over high heat. Reduce to med-low and simmer covered until potatoes are tender, about 10 mins. Add peas and lemon juice and bring to brisk simmer over med-high. Cook uncovered maintaining a brisk simmer until potatoes and cauliflower are tender, about 5 mins. Remove from heat and let stand covered for 5 more minutes until most of the liquid is absorbed.

I personally would have liked more liquid since we ate it with cous cous, so maybe next time we won't let as much liquid be absorbed, but altogether it was really good... for the adults, at least. Emory ate one piece of cauliflower and a black-eyed pea, but he tried them so I can't complain too much. He'd been chowing down on watermelon and cantaloupe before dinner, so it wasn't a huge surprise.

Another awesome thing: I got my new kitchen compost bin in the mail today. It is such a huge improvement over the old one, and I couldn't be happier with it. I read a review on America's Test Kitchen's website of compost bins, and this is the one they recommended highly. It holds 2 gallons of kitchen scraps, is easy to open with one hand, and has a filter to keep the stink in. I also got compostable bags to line it, which will help immensely. Anything would have worked better than the one I was using, which was a cheap tupperware bin with no liner, so it's about as gross as it gets.

Kevin's the one who really wanted to start composting, but I got on board when I realized the crazy amounts of food being wasted by the kids. Iris just throws almost everything I give her onto the floor, and Emory, though he eats pretty well, does leave leftovers. Plus we eat a ton of fruit and have lots of rinds and skin and that sort of stuff to throw in the compost pile. Having a decent bin that's not so gross should help me stick with it. I got everything - bin, replacement filters, and 25 biodegradable bags - on Amazon for around $35!

On the left is the old yucky bin, and the green one is my new awesome one!

Isn't the filter cute?

Recipe overview

Welcome to my blog! We've been doing vegan dinners for a couple of weeks now, and we've had some good ones and some not so good ones. For my first post, I want to do an overview of the meals we've tried and how we liked them. Though we were never huge red meat eaters, prior to trying this vegan experiment we were eating a fairly meat heavy diet, mostly chicken and turkey, so this was a big change! Especially for our two-year-old son Emory, who can be a typically picky kid... but probably most of all for me, lover of all things fat, salt, and carbs.

One of the first meals we tried was a recipe called Farmhouse Fricassee, from a cookbook called Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. We've had this cookbook for a long time, from Kevin's vegetarian days before we had kids (I convinced him he should switch to meat, only for us to switch back a year later), and we've generally liked most of the recipes we've tried.

I probably wouldn't personally recommend this recipe to someone else. I didn't like the taste of the broth very much, and I don't think I like tempeh very much. Kevin, who prepared most of it, said it was a lot of work. This recipe book isn't the type of "fix it and forget it" slow cooker book people might want. There's often a lot of sauteing and adding things at different times involved in preparing the meals. For some, it's definitely worthwhile, but not for this one.

Another recipe from the same book was lentil bolognese sauce over fettuccine (we used penne for Emory for easier eating).

Overall, this recipe was okay. It definitely had a meatiness to it, and lentils have an easy taste and texture to handle for someone like me, who is very picky about textures seeming "right." It called for liquid smoke, and I think it was a tad too much, but otherwise we'd probably make this again.

One cookbook I've really liked is The Vegan Lunch Box. When we decided to cut out meat, I was concerned about what we'd do for lunches. It's hard for me (and most moms I'm sure) to get too ambitious at lunch, because I never know how Iris, my 7-month-old baby, is going to be at lunchtime. She's in a clingy stage right now, and sometimes I hardly put her down all day. I really need lunches that are easy and quick, or at least that we can make in advance and heat up at lunch time. We've tried several recipes with pretty consistent success. One of them was red rice and beans:

Pretty yummy stuff! It tasted like rice-a-roni but much better. We ate it with grilled eggplant.

One of my favorite things we've had so far is a mixed vegetable grill. We have a couple of vegetarian grilling cookbooks, and mostly they're pretty straightforward with their recipes, but there are some delicious sauces and salad dressing recipes in there. This particular recipe had eggplant, squash, zucchini, peppers, and we ate it on whole wheat spaghetti with a balsamic vinegar sauce.

This past week, we've tried a couple of recipes from a website called the Post Punk Kitchen, which is the same person who has done Veganomincon and other popular vegan cookbooks. So far I haven't loved everything we've made, but I'm going to keep trying. I made a couple of mistakes in the sunflower mac recipe that probably contributed to the weird taste of the sauce, and Emory wouldn't eat it. The chickpea cutlets had the same texture problems for me as other things we've made with gluten flour, but Kevin liked them and even Emory ate more of them than I did.

What I've realized from these early experiments is that, for me, meat substitutes probably aren't going to be a great idea. The chickpea cutlets are meant to imitate the texture of meat, but I'm so sensitive to the texture of foods that this has the opposite effect on me. I couldn't even swallow the cutlets because it felt like I had the fattiest, grossest piece of meat in my mouth ever. The sunflower mac called for lemon juice at the end, which I forgot, and for unroasted sunflower seeds, which I didn't have, so I used roasted ones instead. Plus I have a crappy blender, so the sauce was probably grainier than it was meant to be. I don't have a picture of this, but we also tried the Snobby Joe's today, which was sloppy joe's made with lentils instead of meat. They were delicious and we'll definitely have them again.

Anyway, that's a sample of some of the foods we've been trying. We'll have a new round of recipes next week, as well as Kevin's attempts at creating his own. ;-)